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Dave Welch

A Houston activist who is trying to overturn the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance by ballot referendum said last month that a judge’s ruling against him and his allies represents a “kind of tyranny literally trampling on every fundamental right” in America.

Dave Welch and fellow anti-LGBT activists sued the city of Houston after failing to collect the required number of petition signatures to force a ballot referendum on the nondiscrimination measure, which covers sexual orientation and gender identity. Last month, a judge rejected their claim, ruling [PDF] that the activists failed to gather enough valid signatures.

Incensed by the judge’s decision, the group claimed that the judge “caved in to political pressure” and vowed to “take this to the Texas Supreme Court if needed to assure that the rule of law is restored in Houston.”

Welch reacted to the decision in an interview with “The Sam Malone Show” last month, lamenting that “when you elect corrupt, amoral, godless leaders, who obviously have no respect for God’s law, they certainly have no respect for man’s law.”

“We just can’t allow this kind of tyranny literally trampling on every fundamental right that’s been handed to us by the blood of many to be stolen by one mayor,” Welch said, prompting Malone to accuse Houston Mayor Annise Parker of using “Nazi-esque, Gestapo-esque behavior.”

It doesn’t help Welch’s cause that he is on video training petition-gatherers in how to obey rules for collecting signatures, rules that he now says are trampling on his rights.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, spoke at a press conference in Plano, Texas, today on behalf of an effort to repeal that city’s LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinance. Soon after Plano’s city council approved the ordinance last month, a new group sprung up to oppose it, apparently coordinated by Houston pastor Dave Welch, who also led the opposition to a similar ordinance in his city.

The Plano-based Liberty Institute, which said that it will file a lawsuit against the measure, organized today’s press conference with a number of area pastors. Cruz’s participation was not announced in advance, but a reporter who was present posted to Twitter a photo of him speaking:

The elder Cruz has been active in the effort to repeal a nondiscrimination ordinance in San Antonio, falsely claiming that the law allows pastors to be fined for preaching from the Bible.

We’ll update this post with video of Cruz’s speech when it becomes available.

UPDATE: The Plano group, Plano Citizens United, has posted an excerpt from Cruz’s speech in which he urged his supporters to run for office and oust “wicked” politicians who are violating the country’s “Judeo-Christian heritage.”

If the righteous, if the people of faith are not running for office, all that is left is the wicked ruling the wicked, the wicked electing the wicked. It is about time that our people of faith become involved in the political arena. We need to send a clear message, not just to the city council members, but to every politician that violates our Judeo-Christian heritage: we will primary you, we will get you out of office. Only that way will we see righteousness prevail and make America again that shining city on the hill to the glory of God.

Dave Welch of the Houston Area Pastors Council appeared on “Trunews” yesterday to blast the city of Houston’s handling of a lawsuit filed by several conservative activists challenging the city’s a nondiscrimination ordinance.

The lawsuit claims that the city should have accepted a petition to place the ordinance on the ballot, arguing that city officials were wrong to rule a majority of the signatures invalid. When, in response to the lawsuit, the city subpoenaed the communications of pastors who were involved in the petition gathering process, Welch and others accused the city of tramping on their First Amendment rights.

Welch told host Rick Wiles that the move was proof that gay people want to attain “superior rights.”

“We realized that we have allowed the condition in our culture to — where a false and fallacious theft of the civil rights mantra by the sexual diversity movement, if you will, has then become not just a equal rights [sic] but superior rights, and those superior rights of the LGBT movement now literally trump the religious rights and the First Amendment rights of all,” he said. “We’re going to have to fight that back, we’ve got to take this head-on and challenge it for what it is, we’ve let it go way too far and unfortunately, it is where it is.”

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is to be honored by a far-right group whose leader has a history of comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler and attacking gays and lesbians.

Abbot is to receive an honor from two local affiliates of the U.S. Pastor’s Council, the Texas Pastor Council and the Houston Area Pastor Council. It’s unclear to what extent the groups are “groups”: all three share a website and are led by a single man, extremist pastor Dave Welch.

The groups are also planning to honor Paul Pressler, who helped lead the “conservative resurgence” within the Southern Baptist Convention. Former Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr, who now works for Baylor University, is delivering the keynote address.

Likened pastors who vouch for Obama’s Christian faith to Nazis and asserted that “Obama’s anti-Christian, anti-life, anti-marriage, anti-constitutional and anti-American policies” prove he only seeks to “use the church in the same way as a previous leader on a different continent,” Hitler.

Claimed the judge who ruled that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is unconstitutional is a treasonous “domestic enemy.”